Identity

Right after I lost my daughter, I remember saying over and over that I didn't want to be "that woman, the one who lost her daughter." I know I literally meant I didn't want to be a woman who lost her daughter, I wanted to be the woman who had all the children she'd given birth to, alive, healthy, and one day, grown-up. A friend of mine looked at it another way, a way that I didn't consciously consider at the time but probably did already have in mind. I didn't want to forever be looked as that poor woman whose daughter died. I've lived my life to be so much more and felt so reduced to that.

But then, how could I not? How could this one event not weigh upon every thought, action, feeling, moment of my life forever onward? My friend said that this would define me, but that I could choose in what way it defined me, and to what extent.

I don't know that I have chosen it, other than that I made the choice in those first hellish days to get out of bed and get through each moment as best I could. Forget one day at a time, I lived 10 minutes, or even a moment at a time. There were moments when I couldn't escape the memories of her death, and all the events that followed.

As time has passed, the times when I am haunted by those memories have become fewer and further between. Other parents who'd lost children told me I would one day feel guilty about that. And of course they were right. I feel disloyal--as though not feeling horrible is somehow a betrayal of my daughter. It's no longer something I try all day to escape from. It has changed--it's this strange nagging feeling, like a pebble in my shoe that I can put out of my mind when I'm otherwise occupied. But then I get up and am walking around on that pebble, and am thrown back into all the realities of her death. I see her again, see the EMTs trying to save her, see the funeral home...

I am thankful that those memories have faded somewhat while at the same time that I have lost some connection to my daughter. Her birthday is coming up. Last year, my husband and I invited lots of people to a park where we used to take her. We did a balloon release there, and then most of the people came back to the house. It was almost like a real birthday party.

This year, we're thinking we might just have a couple of families, the ones who knew her best, over and have a belated Thanksgiving feast/birthday celebration. I was reading another blog (http://thebigpicturelawyman.blogspot.com/2010_11_01_archive.html) in which a mother talked about not wanting to mark her daughter's birthday or death anniversary the same way as time passed. I'm beginning to feel the same way, and it's definitely affecting my identity.

Thus far, all I know is that my identity continues to shift. Someone who never saw me when my daughter was alive probably wouldn't think I was all that different from when we last spoke. So in some ways, I have come back to myself. The people who were with me and continue to be here for me know that I'll never be the same.

As always, I do believe that I have a choice in the matter. My identity is a combination of what's happened to me and what I decide to do with that. I wish sometimes I didn't have to make those choices, or work so hard. I have to believe it's all worth it, especially when I look at my daughter, who rode to her sister's memorial service in the back of a limo with me but seems completely normal.